This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Feeling played, Oly?

    Earlier this month, Olympia Snowe, the pretend Republican from Maine caved to Democrat pressure on the healthcare bill while it was in committee because she got assurances from her fellow Democrats that there would be no single-payer (government-paid) option in that bill. She was heralded by the Democrats as a wonderful person – the only thing she really wanted anyway.

    Now, Harry Reid has decided that he won’t honor that pledge to Snowe, not that he ever intended to honor Max Baucus’ promise;

    But Reid and the leadership faced this basic math: There is only one Snowe and there are 60 members of the Democratic caucus. If just a few Democrats abandoned the bill, it would fall short even with Snowe’s support.

    “It’s a zero-sum situation,” said Durbin, who is in charge of counting votes in the Senate. “If we thought that just putting the trigger in meant that we’d end with 61 votes,” he explained, then that’s what leadership would have done.

    So basically, they played Snowe just to get the bill to the floor for a vote by the Democrat caucus. You’d think she’s learn. Of course her milk-toast response is that she’s disappointed. She ought to feel like she was gang-raped, and she ought to say so (Bloomberg link);

    Senator Olympia Snowe said she won’t support the immediate creation of a government-run insurance program and raised the possibility that legislation overhauling the health system won’t be completed this year.

    Yeah, well it doesn’t really matter what she’ll support or won’t now – the damage is done. And the Democrats are gloating;

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has insisted that the House of Representatives will pass a health care reform bill including a public option.

    President Obama is “pleased that the Senate has decided to include a public option for health coverage,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a written statement.

    “He supports the public option because it has the potential to play an essential role in holding insurance companies accountable through choice and competition,” Gibbs said.

    But, ya know what? I’ll bet dollars to donuts that she’ll cave and get screwed a couple of more times during this legislative session.

    I know someone who is probably counting his blessings that he didn’t get that job on Snowe’s staff.

  • Biden’s popularity falls lower than Cheney’s

    This last week, Joe Biden bristled at his predecessor’s charge that the Obama Administration was “dithering” on the war in Afghanistan;

    “Who cares?” Biden said, when asked to comment on Cheney’s claims that Obama was “dithering” on ordering more troops to Afghanistan, as he plows through an exhaustive review of US strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    “I think that is absolutely wrong. I think what the administration is doing is exactly what we said it would do,” Biden said in an interview with a pool of reporters in Prague after a three-nation visit to eastern Europe.

    Well, apparently the American people care, Joe. According to Byron York in the Washington Examiner, Biden’s popularity has plunged in recent weeks;

    Biden’s average favorable rating during his time in office so far is 45 percent — well below the average 65 percent favorable rating for Vice President Dick Cheney during Cheney’s first year in office. Vice President Al Gore’s favorable rating during his first year, 55 percent, was also higher than Biden’s. (Gallup did not measure vice presidential popularity before Gore.)

    Of course, this will probably go right over the transplanted butt-hair on Joe Biden’s head. After all, he’s the smartest man whoever lived.

  • Who wants to be the last to die for Kerry’s lies

    The Washington Post reports that John Kerry is satisfied to maintain the status quo in Afghanistan. Kerry is perfectly happy to let the Taliban and al Qaeda run around the country raising Hell and lowering Afghans’ trust in the US commitment to their security;

    “We do not yet have the critical guarantees of governance and development capacity” in Afghanistan, said Kerry (D-Mass.), who just returned from a trip there. “I also have serious concerns about the ability to produce effective Afghan forces to partner with, so we can ensure that when our troops make heroic sacrifices, the benefits to the Afghans are clear and sustainable.”

    So until we get these nebulous “critical guarentees of governance and development capacity”, the folks we have deployed there can just suck eggs.

    Kerry said he came away from his conversations with McChrystal in Afghanistan convinced “that he understands the necessity of conducting a smart counterinsurgency in a limited geographic area. But I believe his current plan reaches too far, too fast.”

    Of course, Kerry is drawing on his vast experience as a Navy lieutenant with three months in Vietnam who personally chased down an unarmed teenage Vietnamese boy and shot him in the back, much like he’s shooting our troops in the back now.

    But Kerry claims that more bureaucrats in Afghanistan are more important than more troops;

    The senator also said that the U.S. civilian presence in Afghanistan is “disgraceful compared to what it ought to be.” He said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton understood the urgency of dispatching civilians to help improve governance and provide services. “They’re trying to find people as fast as they can,” he said.

    Yeah, who is going to secure the area so those civilians can ply their trade? How many US civilian employees are going to die for John Kerry’s latest lies?

    Kerry also took time out to take some shots at the Bush Administration, according to the Washington Times;

    He said former Vice President Dick Cheney has no grounds on which to criticize the president after eight years of failed policy in Afghanistan.

    “This from a man who in 2002 told Americans, ‘The Taliban regime is out of business,’” said Mr. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “This is one time I wish he was right.”

    Another botched joke? The Taliban is out of business – they don’t run a country anymore. Of course, John Kerry can rectify that like we did in 1988.

    It’s almost funny (if it wasn’t so tragic) that the Democrats claim that we can’t afford to maintain the status quo with our health care system, but it’s perfectly OK to do so in Afghanistan. It’s no wonder the troops think we don’t give a shit.

  • 15 hours?

    The Washington Post reports this morning that the Obama Administration completed it’s review of the material that the Administration has assembled to aid in what he hopes we perceive as a decision-making process;

    What was intended to be two or three weeks of intensive White House meetings has stretched on for almost a month. Obama and his national security advisers have sorted through the military and civilian aspects of the war, building toward a decision that many on the outside have urged be made sooner rather than later. Last week, the president concluded the five planned review sessions, roughly 15 hours in all, with top advisers in the Situation Room.

    A month to conduct five sessions – 15 hours in total? Out of the 360 waking hours of the last month, they spent 15 poring over solutions to Afghanistan – 4.17% of their days. I’ve spent that much time thinking about what I’d have for lunch in the last month.

    And, oh, the marathon 15 hours of strategy sessions ended last week and there’s still no decision.

    But don’t worry, the Taliban and al Qaeda forces will be heading to their mountain hideouts for the winter soon and we can procrastinate for a few more months.

    He no longer appears thoughtful about the process – Obama is a populist poll reader who is afraid to lead the nation. The problem is that Americans are dying while he dawdles.

  • Karzai questions US reliability

    The Agency France-Presse and the Washington Times report that Afghan President Hamid Karzai wondered aloud to CNN if the US is a reliable partner. Of course, he says that to deflect criticism from the alleged corruption in recent Afghan elections, but he’d have no point if the Obama Administration hadn’t left him an opening;

    “Is the United States a reliable partner with Afghanistan? Is the West a reliable partner with Afghanistan?” Mr. Karzai asked. “Have we received the commitments that we were given? Have we been treated like a partner?”

    Mr. Karzai said a partnership to him was “where the Afghan lives are respected, where Afghan property is respected, where the Afghan traditions are respected, where we know the direction we are moving to.”

    The comments appeared to allude to Mr. Karzai’s longstanding criticism of civilian deaths in U.S. air strikes, and to President Obama’s still-unresolved review of U.S. strategy and a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for up to 40,000 more troops.

    Weeks after General McChrystal made his request, we’re still waiting for an answer. The head of the largest information-gathering organization in the world can’t translate that information into action. And the answer is so simple; can we afford to lose Afghanistan? Can we afford to walk away again like we did in 1988? Has Joe Biden ever offered a solution that wasn’t hare-brained?

    Even a cursory examination of the facts related to those questions yields a resounding “no” to each. So what’s the delay?

    More disturbing? Aside from the Washington Times and Breitbart, no other US news source is running the story. Do a Yahoo search on the title of the article and see for yourself.

  • Our allies the Taliban

    Earlier this month we learned from the Times Online and VoteVets that the Obama Administration was contemplating forging an alliance with the Taliban in order to bring the war in Afghanistan to quick end. We scoffed at the idea then, and the Taliban themselves give reason to continue to scoff at it today with this message to the people of Afghanistan warning them to to not vote in the up-coming run off election as quoted in the Wall Street Journal;

    “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan urges the people of Afghanistan to not participate in the elections, and once again prove that they are true believers,” the group said in a statement emailed to the Wall Street Journal, using a name referring to the Taliban and allied groups.

    “All mujahedeen are ordered to do their best to disrupt the elections and carry out attacks on enemy outposts and prevent people from going to the polling centers,” the statement continued. The group hinted that they would target election workers and voters. “If anyone, including the participants and the workers, gets harmed they have only themselves to blame, since the Islamic Emirate warned them in advance.”

    So, since it was Biden’s plan, I wonder how he welcomes this news.

    Speaking of Biden, the Wall Street Journal also reports that the Obama Administration is leaning heavily towards Biden’s plan for depending on ninjas and zombie robots to win the war in Afghanistan;

    The emerging strategy would largely rebuff proposals to maintain current troop levels and rely on unmanned drone attacks and elite special-operations troops to hunt individual militants, an idea championed by Mr. Biden. It is opposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Kabul, and other military officials.

    One scenario under consideration, according to an official familiar with the deliberations, calls for deploying 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. reinforcements primarily to ramp up the training of the Afghan security forces. But Gen. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 troops also remains on the table.

    People familiar with the internal debates say Mr. Obama rejected a strictly counter-terror approach during White House deliberations in early October. One official said Pentagon strategists were asked to draft brief written arguments making the best case for each strategy, but the strategists had difficulties writing out a credible case for the counter-terror approach — prompting members of Mr. Biden’s staff to step in and write the document themselves.

    Let’s look at Biden’s record of successes; he was against the first war against Saddam Hussein, for the second one, for partitioning Iraq and, finally, against the surge…so this new plan must a real winner for us, huh?

    ADDED: Bill Roggio points out that no one in the Defense Department was willing to commit to paper a proposal for the Biden plan, resulting in the Biden team writing their own plan without the experts to help.

  • The bad karma of VoteVets

    Dicksmith wrote in VetsVoicea bit about the new Obama foreign policy of openness and willingness to deal with Iran and how we’re reaping the rewards of having unicorns, fairies and other magical beasts in the White House, linking to this NYT article. He also used the opportunity to swipe at the Bush Administration.

    After nine months of an Obama Presidency, Iran has agreed to put their nuclear problem on hold for at least a year to engage in the diplomatic process. Previously, Iran spent eight years thumbing its nose at the international community while the Bush Administration engaged them with a strategy of “ignore it now, and decide whether or not to bomb it later”. This is how the world can work when you have American leadership that doesn’t engage in first-grade playground diplomacy (“You’re not my friend so I’m not talking to you anymore!”).

    That was yesterday. This is today (from Fox News Channel);

    State TV says Iran wants to buy nuclear fuel it needs for a research reactor rather than accept a U.N.-drafted plan to ship much of its uranium to Russia for further enrichment.

    “Iran is interested in buying fuel for the Tehran research reactor within the framework of a clear proposal … we are waiting for the other party’s constructive and trust-building response,” Iranian TV quoted a member of Iran’s negotiating team as saying, Reuters reports.

    Iran’s response will come as a disappointment to the U.S., Russia and France, which all endorsed the U.N. plan Friday that called for Iran to ship its uranium stockpile to Russia rather than continue what is believed to be an weapons-grade enrichment program. The three countries formulated the draft plan in three days of talks with Iran in Vienna that ended Wednesday.

    Dicksmith, karma is a stone-cold bitch. Next time don’t gloat and she won’t be so tough on you.

  • White House concedes Virginia

    Nothing invalidates popularity polls like an election – and the White House is getting in front of Virginians and blaming Creigh Deeds for his loss in Virginia almost two weeks before the polls open according to the Washington Post to mitigate the damage to their own popularity;

    A senior administration official said Deeds badly erred on several fronts, including not doing a better job of coordinating with the White House. “I understood in the beginning why there was some reluctance to run all around the state with Barack Obama,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly about the race. “You don’t do that in Virginia. But when you consider the African American turnout that they need, and then when you consider as well they’ve got a huge problem with surge voters, younger voters, we were just a natural for them.”

    A second administration official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “Obama, Kaine and others had drawn a road map to victory in Virginia. Deeds chose another path.”

    But the Deeds campaign tells a different story;

    Deeds advisers insist the notion that he has distanced himself from Obama isn’t true. “We’ve enjoyed a tremendous relationship with the White House,” said Mo Elleithee, a campaign spokesman. “The campaign has worked very closely with them and the DNC and the [Democratic Governors Association] from the very beginning. They have given us just about everything the campaign asked for.”

    See? There they go again – why can’t they just accept the blame as their own failures and leave the Magic President out of it? Two Democrat governors in a row, and then a Republican – who, by the way, Deeds smeared, the Washington Post smeared and Virginia even tried to cheat absentee voters out of their ballots. Since McDonnell is a veteran and a father of a veteran, we know where those absentee votes would have gone.